Blackmagic Forum

New to Ursa mini pro but shooting video (film) since miniDV days.

I see two basic modes for setting "proper" exposure. I'd love learn a best practice from experienced Ursa mini pro users. I am only shooting "film" setting

(1) visually adjust iris using the LCD image as your guide. While this works decently with simpler cameras, clearly it is dependent on a) brightness setting of the LCD itself, b) any LUT applied to that monitor and c) subjective judgement depending on ambient light for viewing the LCD.

(2) using the (tiny) histogram display. It seems that generally you can expose to the right in most situations. (I'd love to have a bigger histogram and even scopes in the camera.) But this method seems to yield overexposure at times.

Or should I "expose for the highlights" with zebra and let the shadows fall, so to speak?

Use False Colour to set your exposure.

You may need to set colour temperature and tint which can be difficult at times to determine. If you are shooting raw, your temperature and tint are just metadata to help develop the image in DaVinci Resolve for example so you have the flexibility of setting temperature and tint in post production. If you are shooting ProRes, the colour temperature and timing are baked in but you have some adjustments available in post. You can use preset values associated with bright sun or shade or tungsten among others or you can use auto white balance or custom white balance. It’s all in the manual.


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If I may ask a follow up question, at what IRE would you expose skin tones in BMD's log 'film' profile?

Sean van Berlo wrote:If I may ask a follow up question, at what IRE would you expose skin tones in BMD's log 'film' profile?

It would depend where you want to expose skintones, and on the ISO and camera used.

As an example, for the 4.6K at ISO800 one stop over middle grey ("pink" on our false colour) would be around 48.5% in BMDFilm (middle grey being around 38.4%).

Thanks for the quick reply, Captain Hook! I actually remember you, you helped me with an IR pollution thingy I had back in 2015, thanks again! Exposing one stop over middle grey is where I put my skin tones normally, so that's very helpful.